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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  Brigade;
    #1

    you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

     Kensa had been a wild weed once, rangy and determined as it spread its roots in rocky soil and stretched its leaves toward sun that only just reached her through the canopy. 

    She could not be tender forever, and as she grew she changed, and changed, and changed.

    The little shoot that had rooted into the earth beside the lake was gone in the blink of eye.

    Now there are thorns rising along her strong woody branches, and once delicate leaves are serrated and dark. Each day the bramble thickens, cool darkness where once there was only a straining towards sunlight. She has all the light she wishes now, and deep roots to hold her fast.

    There are not words to do justice to the way she blooms.

    The morning’s dew has just burned off, and already there is a hiss of humidity preluding what will be an unbearably hot and airless day. The mountains will be a fine shelter in this kind of weather but the Primarch is not at home. Not yet anyway. She grazes at her leisure, flaxen tail lashing at the rivers of gold over her haunches. 

     Frequently the chestnut’s adventures into the lowlands are inspired by her appetites, though these cravings are not so banal as the mid-morning meal she now enjoys. Naturally there are a great many things she should be doing, but her ability to travel easily through most of Beqanna allows her the freedom to linger when she wishes. Others are already retreating towards the cool shadows of the forest along the river, and though she spares them appraising looks she is not moved to do the same or draw anyone into conversation. 

    Kensa is a creature of summer, and revels in the warmth of full sun upon her back. A light sweat blooms along her neck beneath the blond fall of her mane, and her scent drifts languidly toward a stranger who has perhaps watched her… or maybe has not seen her at all. Kensa herself is looking for no one, and that is what will make this different. She is not a siren today, seeking dark things to savor in the forest, or a doe eyed girl tempting a man with her long looks and dark lashes. Her weapons are on display (she cannot help how she looks or the opium fragrance that rises from her skin) but she does not wield them, she is only a woman worshiping the sun. 

    Kensa



    [brigade] Hi so I just wrote you this. :grimacing:
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    #2

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    Once upon a time, Brigade may have been the eldest son of his parent’s dreams. He had been adventurous and kind and protective. He had been wild and reckless and so keen on chasing the sunset that he nearly forgot how to keep his feet on the ground. But the world was not kind and he had not known the summer’s sweet kiss or autumn’s gentle lullaby. He had only known scorched earth and bitter winds and the truth, the reality, the harshness of honesty as it split open his world like an overripe fruit.

    He learned what it was to make the wrong decision and then how much worse it was to make no decision at all. He had learned what it was to be powerless and then lost and then secluded. He had lost the summer warmth of his family and, most of all, his twin. He had lost her somewhere and he was too ashamed now to show her his face—to let her see the failures written all over the angles and planes.

    So he keeps to himself.

    Sometimes within the confines of Loess, a prison and a haven, depending on his mood. Sometimes within the common lands where he can be someone new. Either way, he rarely seeks out company; in fact, he does his best to avoid it. He sticks to the shadows and the outskirts, his rangy body growing as youth bleeds from him every day. He is handsome, but there is a hardness about him, a sharpness that keeps it from showing completely. Instead he looks defensive and angry, always just seconds away from a fight.

    Not her though.

    She is beautiful and gleaming and it catches his eye in a way that he instantly hates. Hates because he has never been one to be drawn in by beauty—never one to seek it out. But it catches his young heart anyway and he stands quiet for a moment, his antlered head stilled amongst the trees, his hooves paused.



    @[Kensa]
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    #3

    you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

    The little mustang lifts her face toward the sky, shaking her fore lock out of her eyes. The heavens were a clear cerulean when she arrived here but now a few thin ribbons of cloud have pushed in. A very distant sound of thunder turns her gaze towards a far away darkness on the horizon but sunlight ripples over the gold in her hide with every movement. The thunderheads seem to be rolling toward the pampas and though she loves the sun the prospect of seeing a summer storm break over the plain is almost too much to resist.

    Her eyes refocus on the foreground when she turns toward the west and she pauses, a hoof hovering and then settling back into the grass. The intent hunger that had lit her face a moment before falls away as she traces his merlot shape in the shadow, antlered and still.

    Her emotions live just under her skin, and she is not given to tempering their intensity, though she can conceal herself or be cold (something she has learned since coming here, like vengefulness and rage). Sometimes she pulls herself in to consider something: her thoughts and feelings tumbling over one another, tasting and wrestling, behind her beautiful, motionless face.

    How placid she is, as she gazes at him and takes in the intensity of his stare, the set of his features. They are strangers and yet she almost imagines he is displeased by the sight of her. The stallion is jaggedly beautiful, but it is midmorning and he is the kind of man whose arms she might fall into in dark places and deep nights. She finds she would rather know his name. Dropping her chin, Kensa keeps her eyes on the stallion as she moves diagonally into the shade of a tree a stone’s throw from the forest’s edge. She has come halfway, giving up the full sunlight in a kind of negotiation. She can’t reason out why she is doing it but once she is standing near the thick old trunk she turns her gold-trimmed ears toward him and her silvery voice bridges the last of the distance. “Wont you come over here?” No simper or plead, just a question for a summer’s day.

    Kensa



    @[brigade]
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    #4

    BRIGADE

    She is more beautiful, more refined, than anything he has ever seen before.

    It is a poisonous, toxic thing for a young stallion who has tried so hard to keep himself from the rest of the world. His mother and sisters are beautiful, but they are different than Kensa. Pyxis was wild and rangy and beautiful in the kind of way that always held you at an arm’s length distance. He knew the beauty of the wolves and the mountains but not the silken beauty that curves her lips and deepens her gaze.

    It makes the ground he stands on feel like quicksand, his face hardening in defense.

    He is quiet as he watches her cut across the path before him, moving into the shadows, and he swallows, suddenly all too aware of how dry his mouth is. When she finally does address him, he just nods, the silent length of his forelock falling to the side his face so that it can curve around his wide jaw. 

    Brigade takes a few steps until he is closer to her but not close enough to share the space with her. His wings shift to the mottled red and cream and gold of her coat, the feathers ruffling as he draws them closer into his wine-red sides. “My name is Brigade,” he finally offers, but his throat tightens with what he realizes must be nerves. Before he can even consider saying anything more, his lips press together.

    Then he just watches her, his light grey intense and unblinking as he studies her, not knowing how to be anything but the boy raised by wolves, the boy made of stone, the boy of storms and raging waters. Any sense of decency floods from him and he becomes all the more unrefined in the face of her refinement.
     

    the world was on fire and no one could save me but you
    it's strange what desire will make foolish people do



    @[Kensa]
    Reply
    #5

    you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

    She is accustomed to being the light: the flame that draws the moth. They have come to her since she was hardly a woman at all and have followed and followed no matter where she leads. This one though, this man who is only just a man does not strain toward her but comes only so far when she asks, just near enough to speak to her.

    His face is hard, the lines sharper even than what she had seen from her sun drenched place in the meadow and her heart thunders. Kensa should see the way his wings mimic her pelt and know she has him but instead she is pinned to the earth by the feral intensity of his stare. “Kensa. Her name is given as an exhale, not with the usual scratch-and-flick confidence of a quill on paper. It’s a vulnerable sound and she repeats her name, trying to steady herself on the familiar syllables. “I’m Kensa.” Her topaz eyes leave his face to trail over the wine saturated angles of his body, self-consciously lingering on the closely held wings that mirror her skin.

    “Where are you from, Brigade?” He is beautiful, solid and fierce like the mountains, frightening and awing her like the thunder. The little mustang is luxuriously lovely, but it is the sharp edge of nature that she craves: beauty that does not ask to be admired, wildness absent gentleness or forgiveness.

    It takes Kensa a long time to look back to his face, and finds herself to have remembered the intensity of his stare and the solidness of his jawline poorly. An almost imperceptible gasp, her lungs surprised into action so that the breaths are taken in attractive little bursts like a damsel overwhelmed. She gives him a smile, but not to placate him into being something gentler or more pliant. “I’m from Hyaline, in the mountains to the north.”    

    Kensa

    Reply
    #6

    BRIGADE

    She is toying with him, he thinks, and suddenly something defensive flares in his chest. He doesn’t trust the way that her face peers up at him, the ethereal way that the gold catches the light. He doesn’t trust the way that her breathy exhale catches the corner of his pulse and he certainly doesn’t trust the way that he wants to reach out and trace the edges of her face, to see if she feels as delicate as she looks.

    It makes him draw inward, his stony expression hardening, his stormy eyes fierce.

    “Kensa,” he repeats and he finds that it tastes like honey and he can only think that it must be poison. In his life, he has never known beautiful things to be lovely and nothing but. He has never known such things to be innocent and his animalistic nature sends off warning bells in his head, setting him on edge.

    She asks him questions and he nearly balks at it, unwilling to give up too much to the siren.

    But, for all of the danger that churns within his chest, he is not quite willing to completely abandon her and so he is silent for perhaps a moment too long, his wings shifting back to their usual wine red and then settling at his sides. “I was born in Tephra,” he offers and hates the way that his chest constricts at the thought of his original home. “But I reside in Loess now.” Mostly, he wants to amend, because despite the fact that he has traded his freedom for Castile’s healers, he has yet to fully commit himself to their cause.

    He is a ghost.

    He is reckless.

    He is selfish.

    But she mentions her home and it’s not what he had expected. He had never heard much of Hyaline, but he had assumed she must me of the ocean, of something deep, mysterious, and beyond his understanding.

    “What is Hyaline like?” he finds himself asking before burying the rest of his questions in silence.

    the world was on fire and no one could save me but you
    it's strange what desire will make foolish people do



    @[Kensa]
    Reply
    #7

    you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

    She is not loveliness and nothing but… She too is a student of the wild and knows what she has become. Yet would he have noticed her when she was an ordinary thing? Would she have the chance to be so discomfited by the jagged edge of him if she herself were not a saber? If she could know how clearly she is seen and how he pushes past the alarms that sound to linger near her she would be flattered but she has not the slightest idea.

    In fact she ignores her own instincts to try and carry on this conversation when he seems so displeased by the sight of her. She could turn aside and chase the storm in the west rather than the one in his eyes and be much less likely to suffer a lightning strike. A storm will not say her name that way however, making it new again, raw rather than dripping in gold.

    “From Tephra to Loess…” Observes the chestnut quietly, her topaz eyes turning inward and then refocusing on him. The questions she has regarding that move go unasked. They do not know one another. For a moment she wonders if she has wandered into a trap but if Castile wanted to trap her (and why would he?) he could do it himself or with someone who would not look at her like she has melted away into something foul.

    Kensa brightens (she feels foolish, but can’t help it) when he asks her about her home. Her eyes would normally turn north, to fill themselves with the sight of snow covered peaks  but she hasn’t looked away from Brigade and can’t do so now. Dark lashes do drift down delicately as she begins, flicking up again seconds later. “It is incredible. The mountains you have seen from Loess are covered in pine and hardwood on our side, but their granite heights are bare and even now snow clings to them. The tight places where the mountains come together make canyons so narrow that you are often forced to navigate them as a mountain goat would. In the center of it all is the lake, it is very deep but so clear you can see straight to the bottom.” Her voice rises and falls, a gentle rhythm as she appreciates her home to him. It is a challenging, beautiful landscape and… “You would be welcome to come see it. ” Softly, so that the rejection might sting less. He has given her only a question and Kensa has clung to it like she has not ever known kindness.

    The wind that carries the storm eastward is only a breeze when it whispers out of the forest and disturbs the airless heat of the meadow. The flaxen waves of her mane twist in its gentle fingers, bringing them the sweet scent of rain.

    Kensa



    @[brigade]
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    #8

    BRIGADE

    She is a delicate thing and has no business setting forest fires in his chest, but he finds that she does and he can only breathe in the smoke. It is a feeling like being drugged, confusing and disorienting and he can only fight against it—fight against the tightness in his chest and the dryness of his mouth. He can only fight against the way that his head swims underneath her constant, clear eyed gaze, the way that even the wind seems to curl through her mane, framing her face in a way that leaves him aching and hungry.

    The longer that he stands here, the angrier he becomes—at himself, at her, at the world.

    It feels like quicksand and the muscles in his jaw jump at everything that sparks to life in him. She repeats him on his transition and it sets his teeth on edge, just waiting for her to piece together the sins of his past. “Yes,” he confirms and the word is terse, angry. Yes, he was the boy who left Tephra for Loess—trading himself so that Castile would send a healer back to fix his father’s wolf. He was the man who lived in the warmonger kingdom and did nothing when they set their sights on his previous home.

    He did not stand against them. He did not stand with them.

    He just observed and now has to live with the guilt that curdles within him.

    But she doesn’t force the subject and he breathes a sigh of relief, the knot in his chest loosening just slightly. When she begins to talk about his home—speaking of it in such poetic terms that he nearly can see it for himself—he relaxes further, never losing that edge, but softening around the edges just slightly.

    “It sounds beautiful,” he admits, feeling that wanderlust tug at his heart—that constant need to travel and wander and see all of Beqanna for himself. It makes him ache for the wolf’s body that he has never known and yet feels like his own all the same. It makes him angry for everything that should have, could have, been his own and yet was stripped from him. It distracts him enough that he is caught off guard by her offer and his grey eyes snap back to her, studying her with a returned ferocity that lines his face.

    For a second, he is silent, and when he speaks again his voice is quieter, the intensity amplified.

    “Would you want me to?”

    the world was on fire and no one could save me but you
    it's strange what desire will make foolish people do



    @[Kensa]
    Reply
    #9

    you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

    What am I doing here? She wonders, turning her ears back at the anger in his voice. Kensa is not docile no matter what her beauty might lead one to believe and for a split second she wants to tell him to go fuck himself and push past to find better company in hail and thunder. Maybe it seemed she did not believe or thought him a turncoat, her mind creates a dozen possible firing pins for his increased anger before finally settling on the fact that Brigade simply does not like her. Still, Kensa doesn’t leave, only switches her tail at her hocks and turns toward the subject of Hyaline.

    He must think I’m an idiot.

    Yet still she tells him about mountains, and canyons, forgetting the fruit trees or the soft meadows in favor of jagged stone and cold water that will paralyze and drown. These are the beauties: the things that will break you.

    Hope changes her posture, her chin tucking and topaz eyes losing the guard that had come up when his voice had gone sharp. “It is.” She says softly, and he cannot know she thinks him beautiful for the same reasons, that her eyes chase the minute changes in his features in this very moment with rapt attention. It feels like survival. She is disappointed when the hardness returns, but only a little. Brigade meets her invitation with ferocity and her heart races, her head drops a fraction but her ears do not spin back again.

    The electricity that wants to ribbon along her sides and burn her up is just the charges in the air waiting to summon white light down from the heavens, is it not? It is she who gives ground, who steps closer, each hoof lifting and settling again cautiously. “Yes, I would.” She answers stopping where she is, begging herself not to be so stupid as to reach out to him. 

    “Would you come?”

    So like the first thing she'd said to him, but her voice is huskier now, less certain of her own power.

    Kensa



    @[brigade]
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    #10

    BRIGADE

    She sharpens underneath his gaze and he wants to urge her to keep that jagged edge. He wants to cheer her on for realizing that he is dangerous, that he is cruel, that her sharp beauty deserves so much more than his dull company. Her beauty, so refined and elegant, only magnifies with the sudden edges that it grows, the eyes that grow fiery and the ears that sudden lie flat, and he likes her more like this—likes the way that she suddenly feels more real and grounded and then wonders at why he hungers for her more.

    But he can’t tell her such things, can’t even admit it to himself.

    Instead he drowns in his own youthful desires and an ocean of churning emotions that he can barely keep his head above. He just watches her waiver between fierce and soft, hardened and delicate, straightening as she closes the distance between them. Her stomach clenches when she says that she wants him to come and he wants to plead with her to put the daggers back in her eyes, to keep him at an arm’s length.

    He could consume her.

    He could consume her and leave nothing.

    She could consume him and he would let her.

    Foolish, foolish boy.

    “Maybe,” is all he gives and the rasp on the end of his voice nearly gives away the thundering of his heart in his chest—the sound of a waterfall beating against the dam. Suddenly, his gaze turns nearly predatory as he studies her, the colors of her eyes in stark relief now that she is closer, the fine details doing nothing to detract from the stunning beauty and doing everything to amplify it. His nostrils flare as he drinks in the air, the scent of her, that raging fire that refuses to be contained as he watches the curve of her mouth.

    “You should stay far away from me,” he finally warns, his voice decidedly darker.

    He almost takes a step back to punctuate his point but he remains rooted.

    His grey eyes flick up and find her own, holding onto her gaze without letting go.

    the world was on fire and no one could save me but you
    it's strange what desire will make foolish people do



    @[Kensa]
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